Climbing the cosmic ladder with stellar twins

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 453; no. 2; pp. 1428 - 1438
• Main Authors: Jofré, P., Mädler, T., Gilmore, G., Casey, A. R., Soubiran, C., Worley, C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Oxford University Press 21.10.2015; Oxford University Press (OUP): Policy P - Oxford Open Option A
• Subjects: Archives; Astronomy; Astrophysics; Complement; European Southern Observatory; Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysic; Milky Way; Parallax; Sciences of the Universe; Star & galaxy formation; Stars; Stellar spectra; Three dimensional; parallaxes; survey; stars: distances; Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics; Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv1724

Distances to stars are key to revealing a three-dimensional view of the Milky Way, yet their determination is a major challenge in astronomy. Whilst the brightest nearby stars benefit from direct parallax measurements, fainter stars are subject of indirect determinations with uncertainties exceeding 30 per cent. We present an alternative approach to measuring distances using spectroscopically identified twin stars. Given a star with known parallax, the distance to its twin is assumed to be directly related to the difference in their apparent magnitudes. We found 175 twin pairs from the science public archive of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) archives and report excellent agreement with Hipparcos parallaxes within 7.5 per cent. Most importantly, the accuracy of our results does not degrade with increasing stellar distance. With the ongoing collection of high-resolution stellar spectra, our method is well suited to complement Gaia.